It is madness, since the "test subjects" could wind up dead.
Imagine that one of them ended up in a country where they have very low tolerance for contraband, like China or any of the middle east...
Don't tell me that there's no chance that could happen. The Irish bloke had three days after he landed to go somewhere - anywhere - else in the world and be in a shitload of pain because of this weird test.
Actually for at least three or more years in Belgrade, Serbia payment with mobile phones is already in use in some areas. http://www.parking-servis.co.rs/en/parking_facilities/zones/zones_with_time_limit/payment_of_parking At the beginning of every block, there's a signpost with a code of the area and a phone number. You use the code of the area and your registration and send an SMS. This pays for an hour of parking. about 15 minutes before your time expires you receive a reminder SMS that also gives you an option to extend for another hour.
Simple, effective and convenient. If you're parking in the same area often, you only need to check the area code for the first time. After that you can have it stored in your phone and you're good to go. The "meter" guys then simply lookup your car plate and see if you paid or not.
For those who don't have a mobile phone there are also alternative means of paying, but this one serves as the main one.
I find myself constantly try to com back to these games. But in the end I find that the graphics sound and control are a huge let down, compared to the most games today.
I'm wandering how George Lucas doesn't want to make these "the way he always intended them to be":-)
The one thing that is always amazing to me is how few people seem to be using any built-in hands-free kits in their cars. And I'm not talking about the over-the-ear kind of stuff.
I mean, if you're driving a car that you paid $30k and upwards, how hard can it be to fork over another couple hundred bucks and get a nice and relatively stylish kit like the one from parrot.com? And not to even mention, that a lot of the cars have these things now built in by default.
The only thing you have to do is pair your phone, make sure the contacts get transferred to the kit (takes you about 5 minutes max) and then every time you get in the car you can talk on car speakers with great sound quality and see who calls you easily before you pick up the call. And all of this without having to fumble after your phone in your pants when attempting to answer the call.
I've got the kit about 5 years ago and it was probably the best car-related investment I made.
While more often than not I would tend to agree with your point of view, it should be considered just how far this attitude can be carried.
Would this idea of government non-interference extend to a scenario where someone heard a scream from a neighboring apartment and called a police on an off-chance that there might be a murder in progress and not a TV show? Would it go so far as to extend to a situation in a bar where someone is screaming in your face that they're gonna kick your ass all the way down to Antarctica and you would say: "well nothing to do here since the bar doesn't have a security guard"?
Don't tell me that if you go to a bar you don't have a right to expect to be safe. With some exceptions, I believe that most of the bar owners would say that they count on you to feel safe in their establishment.
I do agree that there are places and situations where the government doesn't have it's place, but security isn't one of them. If anything I would prefer to have most of the private security firms replaced by real police with real training, responsibility and accountability. I know that this statement sounds naive but a lot of security companies are simply a collaboration of thugs, looking for an excuse to beat someone up if they're having a bad day/night at work.
I'm sorry, but asking a question like: "can I only use a manufacturer-approved batteries" in ANY equipment never-ever crossed my mind. And, like many slashdoters, I shop for electronics and gadgets on a regular basis. I do not assume that every product will have third party options available. But I do assume that if they ARE available and they work now, they will continue to do so in the future (pending equipment failure).
I understand, and can even support, that using third party options might void my warranty. But I'm always assuming that option to do that is my choice and my choice alone.
no phone in the history of the universe has had a front facing video camera, and Apple itself of course doesn't have the software to utilize it.
As it was pointed out, pretty much every 3G phone does have a front facing video camera. Primarily, since initially that was the main reason for the phones to be 3G in the first place. Videotelephony, anyone?
But if we take things a bit more to the extreme, there have been a few phones, that actually had cameras that could twist around, so you could take a picture of something in front of you or of yourself. http://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_n90-pictures-1155.php
The car dealer will do what you describe when and if he gets a "stolen" notification on his computer.
Alienware (Dell) is here: A) assuming from the start that computer is stolen B) refusing to do anything at all since the guy is not an original buyer
Alienware has no business asking me about my goods without some good cause. Even with a good cause it's probably not up to them to actually do anything about it but notify the police. They are not an investigative body.
It's not a production software and it's not freeware.
It's an unfinished piece of code that's released by MS to enthusiasts who want to try it out and participate in ironing out problems and bugs that remain in it. We all know that they won't completely succeed, but still...
In any case MS is very upfront with how long the RC will function and what will happen when the TESTING period expires.
People who have any other expectations from this code are probably not paying too much attention.
This setup is preferable to swapping out the delicate SIM and transferring it back/forth to a USB modem connected to the laptop, just so the laptop can use the same 3g acct.
Just want to add, that with some mobile providers it's possible to get a 2nd SIM on same account that you use only for broadband connectivity.
In that case you could have one in USB modem / broadband capable laptop and not have to worry about power for your mobile OR swapping the SIM.
If you wanted to share the connection your laptop could still setup that with the wireless in the laptop.
Or could it be that they have a queue full of machines waiting for reinstalls, etc?
I worked as an admin for a training center. We had about 20 PCs in classrooms and about 10 employees, all of which used laptops. Not a huge number of users, I know, but still rebuilding of a single workstation by hand could take a lot of time, if I were to do it like that.
So I simply prepared a network-boot system which had two sets of software images. One was for company users, other for classroom PCs. After the initial boot from network and selection of an image it took all of an hour of unattended install (on a 100Mb network) before the computer was ready to use.
For the company users, of course, that meant that their files were residing on network home directories that were synchronized with their profiles, but that was about it.
It took me about a week to set this up, but I saved myself loads of work afterwards.
Even Slovenia has 1.000 MBps with FTTH for a few years now. Same as above the connectivity starts with 10/10 for 14 EUR/month and tops up with 1.000/1.000 for 1000 EUR/month.
Not to shabby.
It's not available to all subscribers yet but major cities are all mostly covered and the network is still growing.
I don't see why this would be treated as something new or unusual.
US army and intelligence departments are more than familiar with such emanations. In fact they are so familiar with them, that there have been procedures available for shielding the equipment for more than 30 years now. And we're not talking only about keyboard stroke interceptions but also about remote-capture of monitor displays.
You can actually buy equipment that's pre-shielded from a lot of different vendors. Usually it's a normal mouse/keyboard/PC that has additional anti-EM emanating housing/protection applied to it. Of course for about double the price of a standard component:-)
Since couple of years ago it's not uncommon to get VoIP phone from you ISP in addition to the Internet connection.
Many people choose to move since it's now also possible to take your previous phone number and migrate it to the new line. And that's independent of the fact if you stay with the service provider or move to a new one.
Your fixed number can follow you and you never need to change it. The same goes for the mobile numbers, but that's besides the point.
Anytime you do a write, the entire stripe has to be available to recompute parity. If you aren't doing full stripe writes, that will often mean having to read data in from a portion of the drives.
In RAID3 the whole stripe needs to be available for parity recalculation. That's why RAID3 is usually considered a bad solution since most of the applications have small, random I/O requirements. RAID3 is nice for large file operations where you would write the whole stripe at once anyway.
RAID5 is a type of RAID that is also referred to as an "independent access" RAID. One of the benefits is actually the ability to only engage two physical drives for every write transaction: the drive where the data was changed and the drive where the parity resides.
Since the parity is evenly distributed across all of the drives it means that it does not become the bottleneck as it would if you had RAID4, where the parity is on a dedicated drive. That's also the reason why RAID4 is usually not used anymore in modern storage systems.
So the sum of this is that if you have a RAID5 setup that has few disks write performance will be bad relative to the RAID5 where you have a lot of disks.
One thing that has to be a bit clear is that hyerthreading is not the same thing as multicore processor is.
Hyperthreading is essentially (I might be a bit off and oversimplifying here) a processor that has two logical components which are capable of processing independant tasks (threads) in parallel. However vast majority of processor components are still shared (L1 cache for instance).
If we're talking about multicore processor that then means that you take multiple processors and put them in one casing which has one set of pins that connect them to system. Some of the components are still shared (L2 or L3 cache for instance) but now we're actually talking about completely separate units.
From that perspective it would actually make a lot od sense for any SW vendor that has licencing based on the ammount of processors to start counting ammount of cores as opposed to ammount of sockets.
There are a few snags, though:
1. I'm guessing here but I think that (at least for current SW) it's really difficult to distinguish between hyperthreading and multicore system, which would probably make any SW-based licence enforcing difficult.
2. More importantly, however, there's a small issue of actual performance gains.
If the SW vendors would want to charge multicore systems same as multiprocessor ones then performance would have to be same also. That, of course, is not the case.
In case you're wandering why most of Intel-based platforms don't have more than 8 processors (there are some not-terribly-popular exceptions) the reason is following. In Intel platform one of the main performance inhibitors (in mutiprocessing system) is processor bus. I'm not talking about the speed of the bus. I'm talking about the fact that mutiple processors are sharing it. And when one of them is talking to the memory then others have to wait. This problem can be diminished by larger ammounts of L2 or L3 (depending on processor version) cache. Larger ammount of cache will typically mean less need of going to main memory. But because of having a need to maintain knowledge of which processor modified what data in its own cache we usually run into a problem of too much cache-coherency overhead on the bus, in addition to normal processor communication.
As it turns out practicall performance limit seems to be at about 4 processors per bus. 8 processor systems typically use 2 busses that talk with memory and I/O subsystem through a switch and systems that have more than 8 processors expand on that even more.
Anyway. Multicore processor still has that L2 or L3 cache shared. Which means that is cannot perform equivalently the same as would two independent processors, each with its own cache.
Of course there are also other issues but that's one of them, for sure.
Another problem with lasers and similar communication means is that the you would have to know where submarine to which you want to communicate is and then you would give away position of the submarine in question.
That would, kind of, defeat the main purpose of a submarine, which is: being invisible, silent and hidden.
Also regarding the slowness of the ELF and ability for other guys to listen in:
ELF messages are (were) actually sets of predefined phrases in a three-letter form. When the letters were received they could be decoded only by a one-time decryption key that was stored ahead of time one submarines.
As a general rule one-time encyption codes are supposed to be toughest to break since the encyption-decryption algorithms are based on completely random data. So the only realistic (read: quick enough to be usefull) way of breaking that would be to have a spy who would steal the codes and then use the keys to decode them in real-time. Anything else would probably take too long to have any real usefullness.
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It is madness, since the "test subjects" could wind up dead.
Imagine that one of them ended up in a country where they have very low tolerance for contraband, like China or any of the middle east...
Don't tell me that there's no chance that could happen. The Irish bloke had three days after he landed to go somewhere - anywhere - else in the world and be in a shitload of pain because of this weird test.
Actually for at least three or more years in Belgrade, Serbia payment with mobile phones is already in use in some areas.
http://www.parking-servis.co.rs/en/parking_facilities/zones/zones_with_time_limit/payment_of_parking
At the beginning of every block, there's a signpost with a code of the area and a phone number. You use the code of the area and your registration and send an SMS. This pays for an hour of parking. about 15 minutes before your time expires you receive a reminder SMS that also gives you an option to extend for another hour.
Simple, effective and convenient. If you're parking in the same area often, you only need to check the area code for the first time. After that you can have it stored in your phone and you're good to go.
The "meter" guys then simply lookup your car plate and see if you paid or not.
For those who don't have a mobile phone there are also alternative means of paying, but this one serves as the main one.
I second this.
I find myself constantly try to com back to these games. But in the end I find that the graphics sound and control are a huge let down, compared to the most games today.
I'm wandering how George Lucas doesn't want to make these "the way he always intended them to be" :-)
The one thing that is always amazing to me is how few people seem to be using any built-in hands-free kits in their cars. And I'm not talking about the over-the-ear kind of stuff.
I mean, if you're driving a car that you paid $30k and upwards, how hard can it be to fork over another couple hundred bucks and get a nice and relatively stylish kit like the one from parrot.com? And not to even mention, that a lot of the cars have these things now built in by default.
The only thing you have to do is pair your phone, make sure the contacts get transferred to the kit (takes you about 5 minutes max) and then every time you get in the car you can talk on car speakers with great sound quality and see who calls you easily before you pick up the call. And all of this without having to fumble after your phone in your pants when attempting to answer the call.
I've got the kit about 5 years ago and it was probably the best car-related investment I made.
While more often than not I would tend to agree with your point of view, it should be considered just how far this attitude can be carried.
Would this idea of government non-interference extend to a scenario where someone heard a scream from a neighboring apartment and called a police on an off-chance that there might be a murder in progress and not a TV show? Would it go so far as to extend to a situation in a bar where someone is screaming in your face that they're gonna kick your ass all the way down to Antarctica and you would say: "well nothing to do here since the bar doesn't have a security guard"?
Don't tell me that if you go to a bar you don't have a right to expect to be safe. With some exceptions, I believe that most of the bar owners would say that they count on you to feel safe in their establishment.
I do agree that there are places and situations where the government doesn't have it's place, but security isn't one of them.
If anything I would prefer to have most of the private security firms replaced by real police with real training, responsibility and accountability. I know that this statement sounds naive but a lot of security companies are simply a collaboration of thugs, looking for an excuse to beat someone up if they're having a bad day/night at work.
I'm sorry, but asking a question like: "can I only use a manufacturer-approved batteries" in ANY equipment never-ever crossed my mind. And, like many slashdoters, I shop for electronics and gadgets on a regular basis.
I do not assume that every product will have third party options available. But I do assume that if they ARE available and they work now, they will continue to do so in the future (pending equipment failure).
I understand, and can even support, that using third party options might void my warranty. But I'm always assuming that option to do that is my choice and my choice alone.
no phone in the history of the universe has had a front facing video camera, and Apple itself of course doesn't have the software to utilize it.
As it was pointed out, pretty much every 3G phone does have a front facing video camera. Primarily, since initially that was the main reason for the phones to be 3G in the first place. Videotelephony, anyone?
But if we take things a bit more to the extreme, there have been a few phones, that actually had cameras that could twist around, so you could take a picture of something in front of you or of yourself.
http://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_n90-pictures-1155.php
Your example is not quite appropriate.
The car dealer will do what you describe when and if he gets a "stolen" notification on his computer.
Alienware (Dell) is here:
A) assuming from the start that computer is stolen
B) refusing to do anything at all since the guy is not an original buyer
Alienware has no business asking me about my goods without some good cause. Even with a good cause it's probably not up to them to actually do anything about it but notify the police. They are not an investigative body.
It's not a production software and it's not freeware.
It's an unfinished piece of code that's released by MS to enthusiasts who want to try it out and participate in ironing out problems and bugs that remain in it. We all know that they won't completely succeed, but still...
In any case MS is very upfront with how long the RC will function and what will happen when the TESTING period expires.
People who have any other expectations from this code are probably not paying too much attention.
This setup is preferable to swapping out the delicate SIM and transferring it back/forth to a USB modem connected to the laptop, just so the laptop can use the same 3g acct.
Just want to add, that with some mobile providers it's possible to get a 2nd SIM on same account that you use only for broadband connectivity.
In that case you could have one in USB modem / broadband capable laptop and not have to worry about power for your mobile OR swapping the SIM.
If you wanted to share the connection your laptop could still setup that with the wireless in the laptop.
Or could it be that they have a queue full of machines waiting for reinstalls, etc?
I worked as an admin for a training center. We had about 20 PCs in classrooms and about 10 employees, all of which used laptops. Not a huge number of users, I know, but still rebuilding of a single workstation by hand could take a lot of time, if I were to do it like that.
So I simply prepared a network-boot system which had two sets of software images. One was for company users, other for classroom PCs. After the initial boot from network and selection of an image it took all of an hour of unattended install (on a 100Mb network) before the computer was ready to use.
For the company users, of course, that meant that their files were residing on network home directories that were synchronized with their profiles, but that was about it.
It took me about a week to set this up, but I saved myself loads of work afterwards.
Even Slovenia has 1.000 MBps with FTTH for a few years now.
Same as above the connectivity starts with 10/10 for 14 EUR/month and tops up with 1.000/1.000 for 1000 EUR/month.
Not to shabby.
It's not available to all subscribers yet but major cities are all mostly covered and the network is still growing.
My last few Nokias had this support built-in.
Pretty much every other functionality that Irving47 is quoting, as well.
So, while I wouldn't say it's something I felt like I wanted to use (Nokias have keyboards after all) it is something that was available to me.
I don't see why this would be treated as something new or unusual.
US army and intelligence departments are more than familiar with such emanations. In fact they are so familiar with them, that there have been procedures available for shielding the equipment for more than 30 years now. And we're not talking only about keyboard stroke interceptions but also about remote-capture of monitor displays.
You can actually buy equipment that's pre-shielded from a lot of different vendors. Usually it's a normal mouse/keyboard/PC that has additional anti-EM emanating housing/protection applied to it. Of course for about double the price of a standard component :-)
In any case a bit more background can be found here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TEMPEST
Since couple of years ago it's not uncommon to get VoIP phone from you ISP in addition to the Internet connection.
Many people choose to move since it's now also possible to take your previous phone number and migrate it to the new line. And that's independent of the fact if you stay with the service provider or move to a new one.
Your fixed number can follow you and you never need to change it. The same goes for the mobile numbers, but that's besides the point.
Actually nope.
They were made very much in mind with people with glasses as they have ample space for prescriptions underneath.
Anytime you do a write, the entire stripe has to be available to recompute parity. If you aren't doing full stripe writes, that will often mean having to read data in from a portion of the drives.
In RAID3 the whole stripe needs to be available for parity recalculation. That's why RAID3 is usually considered a bad solution since most of the applications have small, random I/O requirements. RAID3 is nice for large file operations where you would write the whole stripe at once anyway.
RAID5 is a type of RAID that is also referred to as an "independent access" RAID. One of the benefits is actually the ability to only engage two physical drives for every write transaction: the drive where the data was changed and the drive where the parity resides. Since the parity is evenly distributed across all of the drives it means that it does not become the bottleneck as it would if you had RAID4, where the parity is on a dedicated drive. That's also the reason why RAID4 is usually not used anymore in modern storage systems.
So the sum of this is that if you have a RAID5 setup that has few disks write performance will be bad relative to the RAID5 where you have a lot of disks.
One thing that has to be a bit clear is that hyerthreading is not the same thing as multicore processor is.
Hyperthreading is essentially (I might be a bit off and oversimplifying here) a processor that has two logical components which are capable of processing independant tasks (threads) in parallel. However vast majority of processor components are still shared (L1 cache for instance).
If we're talking about multicore processor that then means that you take multiple processors and put them in one casing which has one set of pins that connect them to system. Some of the components are still shared (L2 or L3 cache for instance) but now we're actually talking about completely separate units.
From that perspective it would actually make a lot od sense for any SW vendor that has licencing based on the ammount of processors to start counting ammount of cores as opposed to ammount of sockets.
There are a few snags, though:
1. I'm guessing here but I think that (at least for current SW) it's really difficult to distinguish between hyperthreading and multicore system, which would probably make any SW-based licence enforcing difficult.
2. More importantly, however, there's a small issue of actual performance gains.
If the SW vendors would want to charge multicore systems same as multiprocessor ones then performance would have to be same also. That, of course, is not the case.
In case you're wandering why most of Intel-based platforms don't have more than 8 processors (there are some not-terribly-popular exceptions) the reason is following. In Intel platform one of the main performance inhibitors (in mutiprocessing system) is processor bus. I'm not talking about the speed of the bus. I'm talking about the fact that mutiple processors are sharing it. And when one of them is talking to the memory then others have to wait. This problem can be diminished by larger ammounts of L2 or L3 (depending on processor version) cache. Larger ammount of cache will typically mean less need of going to main memory. But because of having a need to maintain knowledge of which processor modified what data in its own cache we usually run into a problem of too much cache-coherency overhead on the bus, in addition to normal processor communication.
As it turns out practicall performance limit seems to be at about 4 processors per bus. 8 processor systems typically use 2 busses that talk with memory and I/O subsystem through a switch and systems that have more than 8 processors expand on that even more.
Anyway. Multicore processor still has that L2 or L3 cache shared. Which means that is cannot perform equivalently the same as would two independent processors, each with its own cache.
Of course there are also other issues but that's one of them, for sure.
I agree with that.
Another problem with lasers and similar communication means is that the you would have to know where submarine to which you want to communicate is and then you would give away position of the submarine in question. That would, kind of, defeat the main purpose of a submarine, which is: being invisible, silent and hidden.
Also regarding the slowness of the ELF and ability for other guys to listen in: ELF messages are (were) actually sets of predefined phrases in a three-letter form. When the letters were received they could be decoded only by a one-time decryption key that was stored ahead of time one submarines. As a general rule one-time encyption codes are supposed to be toughest to break since the encyption-decryption algorithms are based on completely random data. So the only realistic (read: quick enough to be usefull) way of breaking that would be to have a spy who would steal the codes and then use the keys to decode them in real-time. Anything else would probably take too long to have any real usefullness.
V